Things are going well for Korean electric cars.
Kia is pretty happy with its April sales figures. The brand sold 59,063 units in April this year, and it signifies a larger trend for the Korean brand. It’s the brand’s best-ever April and pushes the total number of Kias sold here in the States past the 10 million mark. It’s safe to say we can count Kia as one of those “major automakers” now. It’s not just new models doing the lifting either. Kia’s Sportage, the brand’s longest-running nameplate, accounted for around 11,000 of those nearly 60,000 cars.
But the larger trend we’re talking about here is Kia’s electric vehicle push, with the recently-debuted Kia EV6 leading the charge. The brand has talked before about its greener future, and models like the Kia EV9 and EV6 are part of that. Of course, the range will also eventually expand to introduce more models.
Kia broke its previous electric vehicle sales records for four months straight. If anything, that shows the brand is not only pushing to sell more electric cars, consumers are also looking to buy more, and most importantly, they’re buying them from Kia. In total, Kia sold 2,632 EV6s in April. It’s not hard to see why. The EV6 has managed to excel in its segment by providing customers with a competent electric vehicle in a segment dominated by Teslas that have grown increasingly expensive.
Still, it’s hard to understate the importance of more conventional models to the brand. The Kia Telluride saw 8,233 units find homes in April alone, with the smaller Forte selling close to 10,000 units. These conventionally-powered SUVs and sedans are the backbone of Kia’s sales, which tells us the automaker is still dependent on those models to keep its EV push going.
Despite it being the thing consumers will notice the most in the brand’s sustainability efforts, Kia has made commitments to clean up the company as a whole. The brand joined a conglomerate of companies looking to clean up their supply chains and become more sustainable than they are now.
Additionally, Hyundai/Kia’s Vehicle-To-Everything plan seeks to (at least in part) clean up existing power grids by using energy stored in its vehicles to feed the grid with clean energy during peak times. We’ll have to wait and see if any of those efforts can translate to sales. Having a greener image certainly won’t hurt Kia.
